I Compiled 3 Months’ Worth of Image Generation Prompts
While making promotional images for my company, I kept refining prompts, and in the end three things helped.
First, for style, specifying the medium is more reliable than naming a painter. Like 'oil painting, thick brushstrokes.'
Second, always include lighting. Even just adding something like 'soft window light, late afternoon' raises your results by two levels.
Third, include 'text, watermark' in your negative prompt by default. People who try and fail to add a logo end up with the most text.
In the end, what mattered more than the prompt was the patience to fix the seed and generate 20 images to pick from.
7 answers
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You did a great job. I felt that composition has a bigger impact than lighting, though—I think it might be good to also try organizing how you specify the angle or shot type (close-up, wide shot).
Fr, lighting is seriously important lol. I also got goosebumps when I saw how different the results were after adding soft light.
I kind of agree that specifying the medium is better than artist names, but it varies completely from model to model, so saying that's always the case is a bit much, isn't it? With what I use, if I throw in a few artist names, the style comes out much more consistent. In the end, tuning prompts to fit that model seems to be the answer.
Speaking of fixing the seed, to add to that: fixing the seed and comparing while changing just one word at a time in the prompt is the fastest way to improve. At first I just cranked them out, but after switching to this, I started getting usable results. 20 images is on the low side—I've generated 50–100 per prompt before lol.
I also make it a rule to put text and watermark in the negative. Trying to add a company logo only for the text to come out garbled is genuinely infuriating. And if you specify whitespace, it makes compositing a logo later much easier. If you put something like 'copy space on the right' in the composition, it’s way easier.
But the conclusion that it ultimately comes down to patience rather than prompts is a bit disappointing. Then what was the point of organizing the prompts...? The idea that brute force can make up for it is only half true. If you set up a structure, the number of generations itself goes down.